When Hull had calmed down, he took his case directly to Roosevelt, urging the president to support his demand to Welles. Roosevelt, however, backed Welles, swayed by “the judgment of the man in Rio.”39 Hull never forgave Welles or Buenos Aires. He was so angry at Argentina that he made it something of a crusade to pursue the country and its leaders for the rest of the war.40 Hull came to believe that, as a country, Argentina was simply beyond the pale, and he tried to marginalize it whenever possible.41
For Vargas and Welles, however, all of this was in the future. Still in front of them, too, was the banquet in the Guanabara Palace, a magnificent affair with music and dancing as well as dinner. As the evening became more relaxed and some of the men adjourned to smoke cigars and remove their brilliant white dinner jackets, Welles approached the president to ask him a question that he had forgotten to put to him earlier. Vargas, however, was not in the mood. “We have talked enough already today and we will talk some more tomorrow,” the president promised Welles.42 Vargas was never one for small talk or chitchat, and often chose to leave all that in the very capable hands of Osvaldo Aranha, who reveled in such frivolity. One of the most frequent jokes made about Vargas in Rio (a joke the president quite liked) was that he could be silent in ten languages.43 In one of the lengthiest entries in his diary Vargas recalled the events of the day, stating simply about the banquet, “I talked a little with the Argentine foreign minister.”44 President Vargas appeared preoccupied with the difficult history between Brazil and Argentina and wondered if he was not sowing the seeds of the next war between the two most important nations in South America. After returning from the banquet, Welles received a second cable, this one from the secretary of state, Cordell Hull. This cable included the list of armaments approved by the chief of staff of the US army, General George Marshall, for immediate delivery to Brazil under the lend-lease agreement. The list included thirty-one scout cars and seventy-four trucks or jeeps, as well as ten light tanks—the first batch of a total of sixty-five light tanks to be shipped to Brazil at the rate of ten per month.45 Other supplies were to be increased on a monthly basis, as well, yet the shipments constituted just about the minimum requirements of the Brazilian army, and no more.46 Due to shortages of ammunition, moreover, little was promised. President Roosevelt had already advised Welles that it was better to keep this point from their Brazilian friends. Welles noted that this was in effect a new lend-lease agreement, which largely replaced the old agreement of the previous year.
Welles had his agreement with Brazil, but still needed to ensure that the American timetable for the supply of armaments was acceptable to President Vargas. Given the past failings of the United States to stick to the schedule, the president would still need some further assurance that this time the United States was serious about keeping its promises. Welles also conceded that he would need to reassure Aranha over what seemed inevitably to be a collective failure to persuade Argentina to cut ties with the Axis. Brazil’s minister of foreign affairs understood from past experience that the minister of war and the chief of staff would be none too pleased with the diplomatic developments. He also suspected that both men would be even more difficult to reconcile with the new arrangements if the United States attempted to deviate from the arms agreement. An early sign of the bumpy road ahead came when one of Góes Monteiro’s staff officers reported to his superior that he had overheard two diplomats talking about how the United States intended to service the Brazilian army with weapons, but not ammunition.
At 3:30 p.m. on January 27, 1942, President Vargas called the Brazilian cabinet to order. As in 1939, when the cabinet met to discuss the start of the war, there was only one item on the agenda. In 1942, the debate focused solely on the question of Brazil breaking ties with the Axis powers. Vargas had already decided that Brazil would break relations with the Axis powers the following day, January 28, 1942, at the conclusion of the conference of the foreign ministers in Rio.47
The cabinet meeting would be the final opportunity for the Brazilian military to try to derail the process of breaking ties with the Axis. Earlier that morning, Dutra and Góes Monteiro met to discuss tactics. Vargas sent an emissary to try to persuade both men to support his decision, but they—and the rest of the military—remained unconvinced. Yet their position, when they finally outlined it at the cabinet meeting, was not appreciably different from what it had been previously. “The breaking of relations with Germany, Italy, and Japan will lead to war, and the Brazilian army is not ready for war,” Dutra intoned to the assembled ministers.48
Vargas was having none of this. Nor was Aranha, who concluded the meeting by saying, “Tomorrow we will break relations with the Axis powers, and I take it on as my responsibility.”49 All of the meeting’s participants understood the dangerous course that Brazil was about to embark on. The country’s leaders expected it to be targeted for attack, although there was a difference of opinion about which would pose the biggest threat to Brazil in the coming months, the Axis powers or Argentina. As the ministers headed out into the Rio sun, they could only know that, the following day, Brazilian neutrality would come to an end.
The conference of foreign ministers drew to a close the following day. While none of the resolutions the ministers had agreed to would meaningfully change the status quo in the Americas, they would consolidate economic cooperation between the countries of the Americas and grant aid to the United States. South American countries, mainly Brazil, agreed to supply the United States with strategic raw materials for its defense industries, to create favorable conditions for the movement of capital, and to maintain internal political order.50 The final resolution regarding relations with the Axis powers reflected the position of Argentina and Chile and merely recommended breaking relations with Germany, Italy, and Japan, rather than declaring such a rupture outright.51
Brazil, however, had arrived at a resolution of its own. Most of the nation was listening to radios either at home or in cafés as Osvaldo Aranha stood up to address the conference. His voice trembling with emotion, Aranha briefly announced that a few hours earlier President Vargas had signed the order to break diplomatic and commercial relations with the Axis powers.52 After Aranha finished reading the prepared statement, the conference erupted into spontaneous applause and wild cheering.
In cafés across the city of Rio de Janeiro the announcement of a break with the Axis was greeted with pride—all the more so because Argentina had not followed Brazil’s lead, outing it as pro-Nazi in the eyes of many Cariocas. The announcement also represented a victory for Vargas and Aranha over the armed forces, although the sense of discontent among the senior officers did not disappear, and there remained a possibility that the military’s resentment and latent pro-German feeling would resurface, presenting new problems for the Vargas regime.
For Sumner Welles, the declaration that Brazil was breaking ties with the Axis powers represented both a triumph and a failure. While Brazil had effectively joined the American camp, Argentina had refused to do so—and while not unexpected, this was nevertheless a hugely complicating factor in Washington’s efforts to develop a regional policy for South America. To many Americans, including Nelson Rockefeller, Argentina’s decision was utterly unacceptable, and made the nation the pariah of the Americas. This had an unanticipated consequence for Brazil, as well. As a result of Argentina’s decision, Rockefeller’s efforts to develop cultural ties with—and to spread propaganda in—Latin America came to focus much more on Brazil.
9 Welles Checks Out and Welles Checks In
The foreign ministers’ conference had ended, and Sumner Welles’s work in Rio was nearly complete. On January 29, Welles and Ambassador Jefferson Caffery joined President Vargas and Alzira for breakfast at the Guanabara Palace. All three men were acutely aware of the need for the United States to deliver on its promises of armaments for the Brazilian army—and to do so in a speedy fashion.1 If the Brazilian military perceived that the United States was d
elaying, or suspected that it might renege on the deal entirely, all of the hard work Vargas and the Americans had done to bring Brazil into the Allied camp would be for naught.
As always, Alzira listened to the conversation intently and said very little. She understood that Brazil’s relations with the United States were entering uncharted territory, and that the dangers to her father’s regime from both inside and outside Brazil were all the more acute.
Characteristically, too, President Vargas was still hedging on the question of an American force being stationed in northeastern Brazil. It was the last card he had to play and he was not about to give it up easily, especially in light of the country’s internal political environment. The maneuverings of the military leadership on the morning of the cabinet meeting two days earlier had unnerved the president. If the military had been so vocal about its objections to Brazil’s breaking of relations with the Axis powers, could it now be relied on to back that decision—and the government behind it—completely?
Vargas used his breakfast with Welles and Caffery to shore up his position as much as possible by reminding the United States that he would not be taken for granted. The meeting also served the purpose of a handover to Caffery, with Welles informing the president that he was ready to depart for the United States as soon as the Pan Am clipper service arrived in Rio.
Sumner Welles was intent on enjoying his last few days in Rio before returning to freezing cold Washington and his equally frosty boss, Cordell Hull, who had still not come to terms with the fact that his deputy had allowed Argentina to maintain its diplomatic relations with the Axis powers. For recreation, Welles took long brisk morning walks along the wide promenade of Copacabana Beach. He could often be seen strolling, lost in thought, always wearing his trusty panama hat, which just days earlier he had waved in the air to acknowledge the crowds outside the foreign ministers’ conference. Now it surely weighed heavily on his worried brow.
Rio’s beachfront was in a state of transformation. As he walked along it, Welles would have been able to see old ramshackle buildings in the process of being knocked down and replaced with new modern developments, most comprised of at least six or seven stories. This was the holiday season of January and February, and so nearly all the construction work along the beachfront had stopped. Cranes stood idle, and half-completed building projects were eerily silent, without the normal din of banging metal and whistling workmen. Many of the shutters on the buildings that were already completed were closed tightly, their occupants having already decamped up to the cooler air in the mountains.
The noise on the other side of the road, however, would have more than compensated for the silence of Rio’s construction sites. As Welles strolled along the beach, he would have been treated to a view of a long strip of sand packed with Europeans and Cariocas of all colors, lying next to one another as they basked in the tropical sun. Welles was broadminded, born in New York City and educated at Harvard, and he could not have helped but favorably contrast the unsegregated Rio beaches with the “white only” public spaces back in the United States. On occasion, the Louisiana-born Jefferson Caffery joined Welles on his walks, and the ambassador would comment on the integrated nature of the races in Rio and Brazil as a modern marvel of progress and hope. Welles, no doubt, agreed.
Welles liked Rio, and Rio very much liked Welles. Osvaldo Aranha organized a series of glittering diplomatic events to entertain the undersecretary of state before his return to Washington. Those who knew him well noted, however, that Welles appeared distracted in his final days in Rio. The heat, the never-ending rounds of meetings, and the high-stakes diplomacy with President Vargas and Aranha had taken their toll. Welles suddenly looked old. He understood all too well, too, that the war for the United States was only just beginning, and that the battle for Brazil had not even commenced. Perhaps it was the sea air, but Welles felt tired, and he must have wondered how the human ball of energy that was Osvaldo Aranha kept going without seeming to burn out.
Sumner Welles was not the only man leaving Rio for Washington at the start of February 1942. President Vargas had decided to send his minister of finance, Artur de Souza Costa, to the United States. Souza Costa’s main reason for going to Washington was to try to secure American arms, as well as to help conclude a series of deals for US aid for Brazil’s iron mines, rubber factories, and other natural industries that might prove useful to the Allied war effort. In case the Roosevelt administration missed the point, however, Souza Costa called on Caffery on January 31, the eve of his departure for Washington, to tell him, “The principal object of my visit to Washington is the procurement of necessary armament.”2 Caffery promised to pass the message along to the State Department, and duly did so the same day.3
Souza Costa’s mission got off to a bad start. Welles and Hull had sent a list of armaments that the United States was currently in a position to furnish to Brazil to Caffery back in Rio. When he showed the list to Aranha in the hope that the minister of foreign affairs would endorse it before showing it to Vargas, Aranha had something of a moment with the ambassador. Barely able to control his temper and the level of his voice, Aranha barked at Caffery:
This is just the old run around. You can’t show that to President Vargas. Welles told him that you would give us equal treatment with England, Russia, China—you are doing nothing of the kind; you are dumping a lot of trucks on us; giving us nothing we need for the defense of the northeast: anti-aircraft guns, artillery, combat planes. Tell Welles that he had better just file this away and forget it. Our military people are going to raise hell with many “I told you sos.” President Vargas will never believe the State Department again.4
Aranha was suggesting that this list of arms might not only damage relations between the Brazilian president and the US government, but also turn the Brazilian military even further against Vargas. On this latter point, however, Caffery and his superiors had their doubts.
Privately, Welles suspected that Aranha’s standing with the Brazilian military had been greatly damaged by the breaking of relations with the Axis powers. Caffery had heard that the armed forces held Aranha much more to account than President Vargas for what they saw as a policy disaster for Brazil. Dutra—as well as the British—had noted that after Aranha’s speech breaking relations with the Axis, no other document or presidential decree was issued to officially confirm the rupture. Therefore, as the British outlined, “A change in the minister of foreign affairs would make the rupture null and void.”5 Dutra no doubt figured this out as well. Soon political, diplomatic, and military circles were all awash with rumors of plots being hatched against Aranha by his old nemesis, the minister of war Dutra, and his allies.
Welles decided to have Caffery take the list to President Vargas regardless of Aranha’s opinion. Accompanied by Aranha, the US ambassador traveled by car to Petrópolis, where the president was taking his annual break from the summer heat of Rio. During the journey, Caffery looked out the window at the changing scenery as the car made its way up the winding mountain road, and silently pined, no doubt, for a summer retreat like one the British ambassador had. The usually talkative Aranha, meanwhile, was also almost completely silent for the entire journey. Caffery felt that his guest appeared distracted by the intrigues and internal plots of recent months. The burden of his office weighed heavily on Aranha’s shoulders, and appeared to be pushing down on him all the harder since the foreign ministers’ conference. Aranha was too much the optimist to think that he was done for, politically, but he understood that his enemies were getting more powerful and were circling, waiting for the moment to strike.
Perhaps it was the cooler mountain air or the relaxed nature of the town, but Vargas struck Caffery as being in much better fettle than the minister of foreign affairs. Dressed in casual attire and with only Alzira with him to serve as an aide, Vargas studied the document carefully before offering his verdict:
My offhand opinion is very good ind
eed (of course I will consult my technicians). Welles is carrying out his promises to me. This is not all we need, but the fact that he is getting it to us before the first of next month demonstrates his good faith, which I have never doubted. Thank him from me and thank also President Roosevelt for his cooperation. Tell Welles that we shall be expecting this material as fast as he can send it. I have full confidence that he appreciates our other urgent needs, especially how badly we need artillery and anti-aircraft guns at Fernando de Noronha, Natal, etc., and that without combat planes we will be hopeless in the northeast.6
The president had noticed the same shortcomings in the Americans’ list as had Aranha, but—just as Welles and Caffery had predicted—he was not nearly as troubled by the idea of not receiving all of the supplies at once. As Caffery was taking his leave Vargas repeated to him, “Tell Welles of my high appreciation and of my full confidence in him.”
Aranha was waiting outside the room for Caffery, who told him of the conversation he had just had with Vargas. Aranha harrumphed, “I hope that he keeps to that opinion.”7
Back in Washington, Cordell Hull attempted to assuage the foreign minister’s concerns, writing to Caffery, “Please tell Aranha from me that for once his uncanny intuition has been in error. This is no ‘run around’ and there is not going to be any ‘run around.’”8
Yet Aranha was not so easily reassured. Vargas, Aranha, Welles, and Hull all understood perfectly well that the US list could be seen as a glass half full or half empty. Aranha, with his political troubles, needed the bulk of the armaments to arrive quickly so as to appease Dutra and the military, and chose to concentrate on what was missing. President Vargas, on the other hand, sought to please Welles and President Roosevelt at a time when Souza Costa was trying to obtain important concessions from the United States on key economic and natural resource development deals, and opted to focus on what the Americans had included, not what they had left out.
Brazil : The Fortunes of War (9780465080700) Page 17